[americandream]

Lol...conservatives are totally blameless.....it MUST be someone else's fault.

[Sixstrings]

Suburban sprawl actually began quite a long time ago. It was the locomotive that first allowed people to work in the city but go home to a nice little "ranch" home in the countryside.

Cities were nasty places in the late 19th century. We're talking unregulated factory pollution and gobs of horses deficating in the streets.

Frank Lloyd Wright had a big hand in the birth of suburbs. He began building what he called "ranch" homes in 1890's Oak Park, an early suburb of Chicago. Wright is also the originator of the concept of open floor plans. This is literally the man who took us from the cramped and cluttered Victorian rooms to the more open and flowing living spaces we have today.

Many years later, as an answer to a design challenge for affordable housing for WWII vets, Wright came up with the modernist ranch style we're all familiar with (single story, flat-sih roofs). The style caught on. Unfortunately, the architects who copied Wright were more cost-conscious and not as artistic.

So, the suburbanization of America really started about 120 years ago. This is not a recent phenomenon.

Having said that, I really hate sprawl. I hate big box stores. I hate all this utilitarian post modern architecture. It's a real shame our society has put so much money into these soul-crushing buildings.

I respect Wright's genius, and his work. The problem is an issue of quantity. *Everything* these days is post-modernist, a style which only looks good when seen against a backdrop of more traditional styles. When everything is post-modern, you're just living in a Borg Cube.

[MarkJ]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile keeping the poor locked up in cities, the federal government helped lock the poor out of suburbs. In the 1920s, the federal Department of Commerce drafted the State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA). SZEA, which was quickly enacted by the states, granted municipalities power to regulate the location and use of buildings. Suburbs quickly used their zoning powers to keep out the poor. For example, suburban zoning laws frequently ban apartment construction to keep out "undesirables," or they require minimum lot sizes to keep out less expensive homes. Just as government keeps the poor in cities, it keeps the poor out of suburbs. Either way, cities become the dumping ground for the poor.

[Tyler_JC]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'L')ol...conservatives are totally blameless.....it MUST be someone else's fault.

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MarkJ', 'S')prawl is free market driven.

[joewp]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MarkJ', 'M')any of our suburban zoning laws in regards to lot size, road frontage, setback and buffer between properties are due to the lot size necessary for well, septic system, perk/evaporation/drainage, snow plowing, spring thaw/run-off etc. The larger the home (bathrooms/occupants), the larger the lot you need. Plus people want more room for parking, privacy, future expansion, garages, decks and gardens. The scale (home size in relation to lot size) has a lot to do with it as well. Many people hate the McMansion look of a very large home on small lot.

[MarkJ]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('joewp', 'W')ho pays $2 million for something like that???

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'W')ell, in this case the proverbial 'invisible hand' is moved by eighty years of favorable federal subsidy and policy towards the suburban mode of development, all underwritten by the cheap resource that makes it all possible - oil.

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'W')ell, in this case the proverbial 'invisible hand' is moved by eighty years of favorable federal subsidy and policy towards the suburban mode of development, all underwritten by the cheap resource that makes it all possible - oil.

[nero]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hey want privacy, low crime/noise/traffic, good school systems, access to four seasons recreation, access to suburban shopping/jobs, reasonable property taxes, room for expansion and room for decks, garages, barns, gardens etc. Most of these features just don't exist in the cities at any cost.

[MD]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('yesec9', '1'))[s] Federal housing policy[/s] Cheap energy has moved middle-class families out of cities both by subsidizing migration to suburbs and by making [s]cities unlivable[/s] city living unnecessary.
2) [s]Statist transportation policy, like statist housing policy, has consistently favored suburban migration. For most of the 20th century, a major priority of all levels of government was to build roads. By doing so, the government destroyed urban neighborhoods both directly (through physical destruction of cities) and indirectly (by using roads to drain cities of their middle- class tax base). [/s] Cheap energy brought us mass mobility and we demanded roads.
3) School-based flight has been caused by federal incompetence. For the past 40 years, the federal courts have used a variety of techniques to force racial integration on city schools but made little effort to integrate suburban schools. Because African Americans tend to be poorer than Whites, a racially integrated urban school typically includes children from a city's poorest neighborhoods. As a result, parents who want to send their children to schools dominated by other middle-class children cannot do so without moving to the suburbs or shelling out thousands of dollars for private school tuition. No Strikeout. Pretty much on!
link
The article suggests the solutions for each problem:
1) No New Roads -thank you!
2) School Vouchers
3) Fewer Zoning Restrictions
Let me know what you all think about this article and it's claims.

[MD]

OK, I scanned the article and the author makes quite a few fine points and strings together quite a few relatively unbiased facts into a weak conclusion.
Cheap energy drove sprawl and the have's exploited that fact. His version is post hoc. Move on.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'C')omparing the worst of cities with the best of suburbs is fantastically disingenuous. If only all suburbs were as leafy, connective and bucolic as those built in the early 20c, then there wouldn't be anything to dislike. Of course, postwar suburbs resemble nothing of the sort, do they?

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'C')omparing the worst of cities with the best of suburbs is fantastically disingenuous. If only all suburbs were as leafy, connective and bucolic as those built in the early 20c, then there wouldn't be anything to dislike. Of course, postwar suburbs resemble nothing of the sort, do they?

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'T')oo bad much of the topsoil was lost forever

[emersonbiggins]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'T')oo bad much of the topsoil was lost forever

[MarkJ]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('nero', 'T')raffic, noise and lack of space" are genuine things you can't avoid in the city.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emersonbiggins', 'F')or this reason, you had better cast your lot with pivot irrigation industrial farming in Kansas, b/c the alternative is not about to come to fruition anytime soon.

[galacticsurfer]

About the bad old cities. I live in Germany and most apartment blocks here were luckily destroyed by carpet bombing in July of 1942. What a blessing! Some of the older buildings still stand and those are in pretty bad shape. The English and American air forces really did a professional service in de-(con)struction but they should have given fair notice tot he tenants 40,000 of whom got fried.

Anyway without the available space in America the people would never have been able to move out. In Europe the population is fairly static and got used to he structure of towns long before cars came. However take a town like London. It used to be lots of little towns which then got fused more and more together by trains into Greater London. England has a lot of older housing stock. A nuclear attack would come just right. How do we house the poor minorities in, say, Paris. High rises somewhere out of sight. Ghettoize a la Cabrini Green without destroying the general beauty of Greater Paris. There has been some suburbanizing in Europe but probably nowhere near as much.

What little green spaces and agriculutral land exists must be protected in Europe for the common good as commons or as agricultural land by small farmers who don't want to give up their livelihood. If American population doubles again without crashing then European type problems would also occur mostly. Zoning and denser living patterns.

[vision-master]

My brother lives in an area where in winter time, one may not see another soul for weeks. More wolfs than people.

Life After Poeple